Advances in technology have resulted in smaller and more powerful computing devices. For example, there currently exist a variety of portable personal computing devices, including wireless computing devices, such as portable wireless telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and paging devices that are small, lightweight, and easily carried by users. More specifically, portable wireless telephones, such as cellular telephones and Internet Protocol (IP) telephones, can communicate voice and data packets over wireless networks. Further, many such wireless telephones include other types of devices that are incorporated therein. For example, wireless telephones can also include a digital still camera, a digital video camera, a digital recorder, and an audio file player. Also, such wireless telephones can process executable instructions, including software applications, such as a web browser application, that can be used to access the Internet. As such, these wireless telephones can include significant computing capabilities.
In a wireless receiver device having a correlator based acquisition communication scheme, timing recovery, frequency estimation, and packet identification are typically performed by hardware after an entirety of a sync word included in a packet (e.g., a data packet) is received. Based on the received sync word, a demodulator is then synchronized (e.g., symbol synchronized) and initialized (e.g., primed) to process (e.g., demodulate) a payload of the packet.
Synchronization and initialization of the demodulator consume processing cycles in addition to processing cycles to receive the sync word. Data packet processing latency is introduced due to the additional processing cycles. Communication schemes that do not account for the additional processing cycles risk the demodulator failing to process one or more initial bits of the received payload. One approach to account for the additional processing cycles has been to include a “trailer” (e.g., multiple bits) between the sync word and the payload. A communication scheme that includes a trailer in a data packet is inefficient because each bit of the data packet is not used for transmitting data (i.e., the trailer does not contain used data). Another approach has been to buffer incoming data to enable initial timing and frequency estimate calculations to be completed. This approach results in additional components, memory requirements, and circuit (e.g., chip) area.